Canada’s René-Levasseur Island is larger than the lake that surrounds it.
The island occupies 2,020 square kilometers, while the surrounding Lake Manicouagan covers 1,942.
Visible from space, the feature is sometimes called the Eye of Quebec.
Long Hand
The framers of medieval charters needed to make them visually striking and memorable — relatively few people would be able to understand the Latin legalities, but many would see the documents, and in order to carry authority they had to look different from ordinary texts, remarkable and unique.
One way to do this was with “an altogether peculiar sort of writing, of which the first characteristic is elongation,” writes Nicolete Gray in Lettering as Drawing. In this charter given by Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to the bishopric of Bamberg in 1057, the text is written in long, attenuated letters:
“The strange letter forms impress themselves, due to their difference from the norm, on the peoples’ consciousness and they thus endow the charter with a kind of aura that sets it apart,” writes Laurence de Looze in The Letter & the Cosmos. The signatures were often elaborate for the same reason: “A trace of worldly power is carried over into the writing, the letter forms performing this transfer of the power from the people who created the charter into the document itself.”
Horizons
I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel [‘I’, the first-person pronoun] as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual centre.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858
Misc
- In 1898 Sam Clemens signed a hotel register “S.L. Clemens. Profession: Mark Twain.”
- Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa.
- How many outs are in an inning of baseball? Six.
- Isaac Asimov’s collected papers fill 71 meters of shelf space at Boston University.
- “He is greatest who is most often in men’s good thoughts.” — Samuel Butler
After starring as the title character, Anne Shirley, in the 1934 film Anne of Green Gables, actress Dawn O’Day changed her stage name to Anne Shirley and used it for the rest of her career.
The Liszt Fragment
On April 10, 1886, Edward Elgar visited the Crystal Palace to attend a performance in honor of 75-year-old Franz Liszt, who was visiting England after an absence of many years. In the margin of his program Elgar made a cryptic notation:
What does it mean? Anthony Thorley suggested that it was a cipher representing the words GETS YOU TO JOY, AND HYSTERIOUS, where the last word is a portmanteau combining hysteria and mysterious. But that seems contrived, and in any case “this doesn’t fit!” writes Craig Bauer in Unsolved!, his history of ciphers. “Not only do repeated letters fail to line up with the same squiggles each time, but we don’t even have the right number of squiggles. The last six letters of the proposed decipherment have nothing to line up with.”
If Thorley is mistaken, then this fragment remains unsolved, like Elgar’s Dorabella cipher of 11 years later. Are the two messages related?
Unquote
“I’m not good-looking. … What I have got is I have character in my face. It’s taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there.” — Humphrey Bogart
“If a face like Ingrid Bergman’s looks at you as though you’re adorable, everybody does. You don’t have to act very much.” — Humphrey Bogart
“All I do to look evil is to let my beard grow for two days.” — Humphrey Bogart
Podcast Episode 176: The Bear That Inspired Winnie-the-Pooh
In 1914, Canadian Army veterinarian Harry Colebourn was traveling to the Western Front when he met an orphaned bear cub in an Ontario railway station. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the adventures of Winnie the bear, including her fateful meeting with A.A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin.
We’ll also marvel at some impressive finger counting and puzzle over an impassable bridge.
Hybrid Sports
Chess boxing has evolved from a performance art piece to a serious worldwide professional sport. Two competitors engage in six rounds of chess and five rounds of boxing, switching between the two every three minutes. A player can win by knockout, technical knockout, or checkmate, or if his opponent resigns, exceeds the time limit, or is disqualified. If both the contests end in a draw, the player of the black pieces wins.
In football tennis (below), you have to return the ball over the net without using your hands. Up to three players can play on each side, with corresponding rules regarding the number of touches and bounces allowed on each return. This sport is growing too — the first rules were written in 1940, and it held its 11th world championship in 2014. Now we need a way to combine all four of these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArFG541WLN8
Case Work
Samuel Morse’s original plan for Morse code was to assign numbers to words; the operator would have to look up each number in a codebook as it was received in order to find its meaning. Morse’s New Jersey collaborator Alfred Vail thought this was tedious and expanded the code to a system of dots and dashes, where each letter of the alphabet was represented by a series of symbols.
To keep this simple he needed to work out the relative frequency of English letters, so that the most commonly used letters could get the shortest sequences of symbols. And “a happy idea enabled him to save his time. He went to the office of the local newspaper in Morristown and found the result he wanted in the type-cases of the compositors. The code was then arranged so that the most commonly used letters were indicated by the shortest symbols — a single dot for an E, a single dash for T and so on.”
Despite such breakthroughs, Vail finally left the telegraph business because he felt it didn’t value his contributions — even as superintendent of the Washington and New Orleans Telegraph Company he received only $900 a year. He wrote to Morse in 1848, “I have made up my mind to leave the Telegraph to take care of itself, since it cannot take care of me. I shall, in a few months, leave Washington for New Jersey, … and bid adieu to the subject of the Telegraph for some more profitable business.”
(From Russell W. Burns, Communications: An International History of the Formative Years, 2004.)
Technically Color
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qku4jtvtay8&t=114m07s
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound was shot in black and white, but the conclusion contains two frames of red when a gun is fired (1:54:40 above).
(This involves a big spoiler, so don’t click if you haven’t seen the movie.)